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I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Happy Friday, friends!  This week my blog topped 4k views for all time, so thanks for all the love!

jinx-star
This post is a follow-up from last week's.  The Neif do a ton of things with their hands, like we do, but they also use them for something we don't:  having sex.  Sure, we can get our hands involved in all kinds of sexy stuff, but for the Neif, their hands are their reproductive organs.  That's it.

I'm in the process of writing a Neif sex scene.  I technically start my story with one (check out a version here) but this is different.  The opening scene is a Lifegiving, where there will be a birth immediately following the hand-holding.  In the one I'm currently writing, it's a first sexual encounter for two young Neif.  They are alone, in private, contrasted with the Lifegiving which is in front of the whole village and needs the First Elder in order to produce offspring.  

The Lifegiving scene is meant to read more like a religious rite than a sexual encounter, so I went out onto the interwebs to get some advice on how to write sex scenes.  Most of the advice was about all the things not to do.  Don't use pet names for body parts.  Don't make it strictly anatomical and mechanical.  Don't make it unbelievably pornographic.  Don't make it misogynistic.  Don't make it unrealistic.  Don't forget that sex is weird and awkward and messy and funny.  Don't forget that the goal of a sex scene is to turn on your reader.  Don't forget that these are characters and this should somehow forward the story.

Most of this is no help to me.  This is about human sex.  I'm not writing about humans having sex.  I'm writing about sex in an invented culture in an invented race.

But when I kept thinking about it, I realized these might be indirectly helpful.  The Neif are going to have all the same hangups about sex that we humans do, but just in different ways.  For example, is it gross to have sex after taking off the gloves you've been working in all day, so you're a little sticky?  Do they like to have sex right after they go to the Reformery so they'll be all "fresh and clean?"  Since they all have hands, and they're all the same size, does that remove the dominant/submissive aspect of sex that we humans tend to get tripped up by?  I have my work cut out for me.
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